I spent some time looking at the Radian6 Social Media Monitoring Platform today and hopefully, will be testing it out quite a bit, soon.  I had not heard of Radian6 till a few weeks ago when I was in Toronto for the Social Media RoundTable Social Media RoundTable Summary and WhitePaper ahead and More feedback from Third Tuesday in Toronto  when I sat next to Marcel LeBrun, who is one of the main people responsible for Radian6 (maybe it's his company).

Marcel had Richard McInnis on Radian6 give me this briefing which was quite good, and I asked a lot of questions!   Why this platform is called Radian6, I'm not really sure - perhaps it has to do with what a "radian" is - a standard unit of measurement - and maybe the "6" is that radian6 is "complete circle" according to Wikipedia:

The radian is a unit of plane angle, equal to 180/π degrees, or about 57.2958 degrees. It is the standard unit of angular measurement in all areas of mathematics beyond the elementary level.

When you open up a project in Radian6 you can

 

1
 
choose a Topic Profile with  Microblogging is Twitter Only while Video includes 22 Video sources included Blinkx and Images only cover Flickr accounts. 
 
Buzzmetrics vs. Radian6 - one costs 50K per engagement (starting) vs Radian6 at about 6K per year.  But Radian6 gives you Real-time monitoring while Buzzmetrics that could give you Brand Report but you are not so free to update your reports or able to run up to the minute reports.   
 
Radian6 has been typically bought and used by Corporate Communications or Brand Managers, not so much by Web Analyst Groups - but I think that could change - It all comes down to ROI and we might need to work with packages like Radian6 to get a handle on Social Media ROI.  
 
To some extent it’s evaluatiing what’s going on in the Social Web and assist in monitoring your Brand and handling Crisis Management. 

In the above diagram You can also filter by region and that's a three step process (domain name, about us section section of a blog, country IP range).  To date, Radian6 haven’t done a lot of statistical analysis on the accuracy of the regional filtering – but it’s often combined with language and users seem to like the results.

 
 
You also get "Engagement" measurement - Engagement is defined as the total number of unique commenters who are re-commenting – and the average length of the comments – score from 1-10. 
 
Honestly, I think we need to come up with a definitive definition of a conversation and maybe this is good place to look - at how Radian6 defines conversations.
 
Radian6 had the concept of a "River of News" (see below):
 

 

 
and a list of incoming sites ranking by Influence
 
 
And then you can tune the "influence Scoring" by 5 factors currently (see below):
 
 

Influence Formula – dashboard (above).  The last dial is the most popular with Radian6 clients. This may be unique to Radian6 – but they may not cover everything – we don’t believe there is a secret sauce, says Richard. 
 
The Equalizer settings and the ranking are set to a rolling 30 day window.
30 day limitation seems somewhat arbitrary for Influencer scoring - I think they should make it variable up to 180 days - and I'm sure, in time, they will.
 
You also look at influencers by site (see below)
 

 
The only thing I took issue with is Radian6 doesn't really look at Brand Sites, per se, at least, not yet.  If I wanted to look at a Branded site this way, I couldn't do it because it's not, in itself, considered Social Media by Radian6 - but the traffic to that site, could be.  
 
I argued that someday soon, we'll just want to look at any site from the point of view of the Influencers linking to it.
 
In terms of Search Marketing - there is value in using Radian6 to come up with keywords around the topics that are most influential though it doesn't yet do enough with Keyword Phrases - however, maybe I'll be able to talk them into making some of the improvements that would make it a stronger fit here (see below):
 
 
 
I think there's a lot of value in having a platform like Radian6 in the Web Analytics  group, not just in Brand or Corporate Marketing - but Social Media doesn't yet fit into Corporations in a very uniform way -some companies are more "committed" to  Social Media and will find a platform such as Radian6 very useful while others don't seem to have any concept of what to do with it and where it belongs in the organization.
 
And that's the next battle - the battle to get Social Media Measurement to be considered a "must have" like Search Marketing and Web Analytics are today.
 
More on Radian6 once I work with it on a regular basis.